Category Archives: Metal

December 1 – Weekly Recap of Digital Rebar, RackN, and Industry News

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Welcome to the weekly post of the RackN blog recap of all things Digital Rebar, RackN, Edge Computing, and DevOps. If you have any ideas for this recap or would like to include content please contact us at info@rackn.com or tweet RackN (@rackngo)

Items of the Week

Industry News

Edge computing, in the context of IoT, is the idea that you can actually do some of the computational work required by a system close to the endpoints instead of in a cloud or a data center. The intent is to minimize latency, which, according to Renaud, means that it’s going to be a hot trend in certain kinds of industrial IoT application.

Solution providers that have been hit hard by a data center hardware retreat are finding sales and profit growth by living on the edge—the network edge, that is.

DevOps — a term used to refer to the integration of software developers and operations teams — continues to spread like wildfire throughout the open networking ecosystem. The main idea behind DevOps is that by breaking down barriers between these two departments, market applications can be delivered faster with lower costs and better quality. Nevertheless, for all the advantages attached to DevOps, it is still a budding concept since it is primarily concerned with re-aligning the workforce with a variety of tools. The following, therefore, is a list of DevOps trends to keep an eye out for.

Digital Rebar

Our architectural plans for Digital Rebar are beyond big – they are for massive distributed scale. Not up, but out. We are designing for the case where we have common automation content packages distributed over 100,000 stand-alone sites (think 5G cell towers) that are not synchronously managed. In that case, there will be version drift between the endpoints and content. For example, we may need to patch an installation script quickly over a whole fleet but want to upgrade the endpoints more slowly.

Prior Meetup on November 21st Notes

RackN

Yesterday, AWS confirmed that it actually uses physical servers to run its cloud infrastructure and, gasp, no one was surprised.  The actual news about the i3.metal instances by AWS Chief Evangelist Jeff Barr shows that bare metal is being treated as just another AMI managed instance type (see also Geekwire, Techcrunch, Venture Beat).  For AWS users, there’s no drama here because it’s an incremental add to processes they are already know well.

We are actively looking for feedback from customers and technologists before general availability of both RackN and the Terraform plug-in. It takes just a few minutes to get started and we offer direct engineering engagement on our community slack channel. Get started now by providing your email on our registration pagey so we can provide you all the necessary links.

L8ist Sh9y Podcast

Podcast Guest: Krishnan Subramanian, Rishidot Research

Founder and Chief Research Advisor, Infrastructure, Application Platforms and DevOps

UPCOMING EVENTS

  • KubeCon + CloudNativeCon : Dec 6 – 8 in Austin, TX

Event plans for the RackN and Digital Rebar team include 2 sessions and the RackN booth. We look forward to seeing you in Austin.

The RackN team is preparing for a series of upcoming events where they are speaking or just attending. If you are interested in meeting with them at these events please email info@rackn.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sound and Fury as AWS Pulls Back Curtain for Bare Metal Offering

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Yesterday, AWS confirmed that it actually uses physical servers to run its cloud infrastructure and, gasp, no one was surprised.  The actual news about the i3.metal instances by AWS Chief Evangelist Jeff Barr shows that bare metal is being treated as just another AMI managed instance type (see also Geekwire, Techcrunch, Venture Beat).  For AWS users, there’s no drama here because it’s an incremental add to processes they are already know well.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is fundamentally about automation and API not the type of infrastructure.

Lack of drama is a key principle at RackN: provisioning hardware should be as easy to automate as a virtual machine. The addition of bare metal to the AWS instance types validates two important parts of the AWS cloud automation story.  First, having control metal is valuable and, second, operations are expected image (AMI) based deployments.

There are interesting AWS specific items to unpack around this bare metal announcement that shows otherwise hidden details about AWS infrastructure.

It took Amazon a long time to create this offering because allowing users to access bare metal requires a specialized degree of isolation inside their massive data center.  It’s only recently possible in AWS data centers because of their custom hardware and firmware.  These changes provide AWS with a hidden control layer under the operating system abstraction.  This does not mean everyone needs this hardware – it’s an AWS specific need based on their architecture.

It’s not a surprise the AWS has built cloud infrastructure optimized hardware.  All the major cloud providers design purpose-built machines with specialized firmware to handle their scale network, security and management challenges.

The specialized hardware may create challenges for users compared to regular virtualized servers.  There are already a few added requirements for AMIs before they can run on the i3.metal instance.  Any image deploy to metal process requires a degree of matching the target server.  That’s the reason that Digital Rebar defaults to safer (but slower) kickstart and pre-seed processes.

Overall, this bare metal announcement is signifying nothing dramatic and that’s a very good thing.

Automating every layer of a data center should be the expected default.  Our mission has been to make metal just another type of automated infrastructure and we’re glad to have AWS finally get on the same page with us.

Data Center’s Last Mile: Zero Touch Metal Automation

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The embedded video is an excellent RackN and Digital Rebar overview created by Rob Hirschfeld and Greg Althaus, co-founders of RackN on the critical issue facing data center operations teams. Their open-source based offering completes the integration challenge existing between platforms/orchestration tools and control/provision technology.

By integrating with the platform and orchestration solutions, RackN is able to replace the control and provisioning tools without adding complexity or replacing established technology.

Watch the complete video below as Rob Hirschfeld provides the background of how RackN arrived at the current offering and the benefits for data center operators to support bare metal provisioning as well as immutable infrastructure. (Slides)

The demonstration video referenced in this overview:

The white paper referenced in this overview:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Have more questions? Contact us at sales@rackn.com or via social media on Twitter at @rackngo to learn more.

November 17 – Weekly Recap Of All Things Digital Rebar And RackN

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Welcome to the weekly post of the RackN blog recap of all things Digital Rebar, RackN, SRE, and DevOps. If you have any ideas for this recap or would like to include content please contact us at info@rackn.com or tweet Rob (@zehicle) or RackN (@rackngo)

Items of the Week

Digital Rebar

 

 

 

 

Terraform Bare Metal – A Leap Forward for SDx

Software Defined Infrastructure (SDx) allows operators to manage data centers in a more consistent and controlled way. It allows teams to define their environment as code and use automation to execute that definition in practice. To deliver this capability for physical (aka bare metal) servers, RackN has created a Digital Rebar provider for Terraform. The provider is a simple addition that take just seconds to enable. Read More

Digital Rebar Online Community Meetup

Our 5th Meetup is Tuesday Nov 21…

Welcome to the fifth (v005) Digital Rebar online meetup!  In today’s meetup we’ll discuss the status of Digital Rebar Provision v3.3.0 features and planning activities along with Understanding the Runner and Jobs system in Stage transitions.  We’ll conclude with opening up the floor for community feedback.

Join the Meetup Group

RackN

 

 

 

 

 

The RackN Beta now contains Digital Rebar Provision v3.2 as well as the Terraform Bare Metal Plug-in currently in final testing for official release from HashiCorp. To join the beta, simply provide your email on our registration page so we can provide the software as well as ensure our engineers are able to engage directly in support during setup and operation.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Joining this week’s L8ist Sh9y Podcast is Yves Boudreau, VP or Partnerships and Ecosystem Strategy at Ericsson. Rob Hirschfeld and Yves discuss the Ericsson Unified Delivery Network platform and the concept of a global content provider service built on heterogeneous infrastructure. Yves also provides insight into what webscale customers are looking for in the Edge as they give thought around balancing their applications from public cloud services to future edge clouds.  Finally, Rob and Yves talk about the coming fundamental change in how software is created and run “independent” of hardware.”  (Blog with Time/Questions)

UPCOMING EVENTS

Rob Hirschfeld and Greg Althaus are preparing for a series of upcoming events where they are speaking or just attending. If you are interested in meeting with them at these events please email info@rackn.com

If you are attending any of these events please reach out to Rob Hirschfeld to setup time to learn more about our solutions or discuss the latest industry trends.

OTHER NEWSLETTERS

 

 

 

Terraform Bare Metal – A Leap forward for SDx

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Software Defined Infrastructure (SDx) allows operators to manage data centers in a more consistent and controlled way. It allows teams to define their environment as code and use automation to execute that definition in practice. To deliver this capability for physical (aka bare metal) servers, RackN has created a Digital Rebar provider for Terraform. The provider is a simple addition that take just seconds to enable. (Video Demonstrations at End of Blog)

The Terraform Bare Metal provider allows plans to provision and recover servers using a node resource.

The operation of this provider is simple and relies on standard workflow stages in Digital Rebar. Adding the Terraform Content Package installs a new stage that adds Terraform parameters. Including this stage in the global workflow will automatically register machines as available for Terraform. The integration uses two parameters to manage the server pool: Terraform Managed and Terraform Assigned.

When the Terraform provider asks for a node resource, it queries the Digital Rebar API for machines that are managed (true) and not assigned (false) plus whatever additional filters were required in the plan. The provider then uses the API to set assigned true and the requested Stage (e.g. centos-install) and polls until the node enters the Complete stage. The destroy action reverses the action to release the node. Digital Rebar uses the stage changes as a trigger to restart the machine workflow.

Using a Terraform plan with Digital Rebar, operators can manage complex data centers layouts from a single command line.

For users, all of the above steps are completely hidden. Operators can monitor the request using the Digital Rebar UX to ensure the plan is executing. In addition, plan metadata can set user or identification values to the machines when they are reserved to help track allocations. In this way, administrators can easily track and account for machines reserved via Terraform.

For full out-of-band control, users should add the RackN IPMI plugin. This adds the ability to force power states during plan execution. The provider does not require out-of-band management to function. RackN also maintains Packet.net and VirtualBox plugins with the same API as the IPMI plugin. This allows developers to easily test plans against virtual or cloud resources.

RackN customers are making big plans to use this simple and powerful integration to manage their own SDx roadmap. We’re excited to hear about new ways to improve data center operations, especially new edge ideas. Let us know what you are thinking!

Demonstration of Terraform Bare Metal Provisioning with Digital Rebar Provision V3.2

Setting up the Environment to run Digital Rebar Provision V3.2 for Terraform

Breaking the Silicon Floor – Digital Rebar v3.2 unlocks full life-cycle control for hardware provisioning

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The difficulty in fully automating physical infrastructure environments, especially for distributed edge, adds significant cost, complexity and delay when building IT infrastructure. We’ve called this “underlay” or “ready state” in the past but “last mile” may be just as apt. The simple fact is that underlay is the foundation for everything you build above it so mistakes there are amplified.

Historically, simple systems still required manual or custom steps while complex systems where fragile and hard to learn. This dichotomy drives operators to add a cloud abstraction layer as a compromise because the cloud adds simple provisioning APIs at the prices of hidden operational complexity.

What if we had those simple APIs directly against the metal? Without the operational complexity?

That’s exactly what we’ve achieved in the latest Digital Rebar release. In this release, the RackN team refined the Digital Rebar control flows introduced in v3.1 based on customer and field experience. These flow are simple to understand, composable to build and amazingly fast in execution.

For example, you can build workflows that handle discovering machines with burn-in and inventory stages that install ssh keys that automatically register themselves for Terraform consumption. Our Terraform provider can then take those machines and make new workflow requests like “install CentOS” and tell me when it’s ready. When you’re finished, another workflow will teardown the system and scrub the data. That’s very cloud like behavior but directly on metal.

These workflows are designed to drive automatic behavior (like joining a Kubernetes cluster), simplify API requests (like target state for Terraform), or prepare environments for orchestration (like dynamic inventory for Ansible). They reflect our design goal to ensure that Digital Rebar integrates upstack easily.

Our point with Digital Rebar is to drive full automation down into the physical layer. By fixing the underlay, our approach accelerates and simplifies orchestration and platform layers above. We’re excited about the progress and invite you take 5 minutes to try our quick start.

Follow the Digital Rebar Community:

Rishidot Research Briefing Notes on RackN

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Rishidot Research recently published a profile of the new RackN Beta program, Briefing Notes: RackN Launches in Beta. This document contains a Market Overview, RackN Offering, SWOT Analysis, and Conclusions.

Rishidot provided several key messages in their briefing notes that are worth highlighting:

  • Bare Metal as a Service – offers a better fit for running containers in the enterprise without the overhead of virtualization.
  • Simplification and Choice – by decoupling provisioning, management, and orchestration into distinct layers, RackN allows customers flexibility in choosing orchestration tools already in use
  • Data Center vs Cloud – RackN automation to underlying infrastructure makes datacenter provisioning competitive in a cloud world

Read the Complete Briefing Notes

Disclosure: RackN has hired Rishidot in the past.

About Rishidot Research

In ancient Indian mythology, the Rishis were the embodiment of all-encompassing knowledge with the ability to foresee the future and help handle change. Named after the mythical Rishis, Rishidot Research LLC is an analyst firm dedicated to deep understanding of technology and the ability to foresee trends.

Unlike ever before, technological evolution is happening at an exponential rate. In order to maintain their competitive edge, organizations need to both keep up with emerging technologies and align the IT goals with their business objectives. Rishidot Research helps organizations transform to Modern Enterprise by offering strategic advise to leadership on their modernization strategy and help teams understand and navigate the technology landscape. Our focus is on helping enterprises decipher and adapt to the fast changing technological landscape dominated by cloud computing, Big Data, IoT and AI.

Contact: Krishnan Subramanian at @rishidot or +1-617-657-4744

HashiConf 2017: Messy yet Effective Hybrid Portability

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Last week, I was able to attend the HashiConf 2017 event in my hometown of Austin, Texas.  HashiCorp has a significant following of loyal fans for their platforms and the show reflected their enthusiasm for the HashiCorp clean and functional design aesthetic.  I count the RackN team in that list – we embedded Consul deeply into Digital Rebar v2 and recently announced a cutting edge bare metal Terraform integration (demo video) with Digital Rebar Provision (v3).

Overall, the show was impressively executed.  It was a comfortable size to connect with attendees and most of the attendees were users instead of vendors.  The announcements at the show were also notable.  HashiCorp announced enterprise versions of all their popular platforms including Consul, Vault, Nomad and Terraform.  For their enterprise versions include a cross-cutting service, Sentinel, that provides a policy engine to help enforce corporate governance.

Since all the tools are open source, creating an enterprise version can cause angst in the community.  I felt that they handled the introduction well and the additions were well received.  Typically, governance controls are a good demarcation for Enterprise features.

I was particularly impressed with the breadth and depth of Terraform use discussed at the event.  Terraform is enjoying broad adoption as a cluster builder so it was not surprising to see it featured on many talks.  The primary benefits highlighted were cloud portability and infrastructure as code.  

This was surprising to me because Terraform plans are not actually cloud agnostic – they have to be coded to match the resources exposed by the target.

When I asked people about this the answer was simple: the Terraform format itself provides sufficient abstraction.  The benefit of having a single tool and format for multiple infrastructure created very effective portability.

Except the lack of cloud abstractions also drove a messy pattern that I saw in multiple sessions.  Many companies have written custom (“soon to be open sourced”™) Terraform plan generators in their own custom markup languages.  That’s right – there’s an emerging, snowflaked Terraform generator pattern.  I completely understand the motivation to build this layer; however, it strikes me as an anti-pattern.

Infrastructure portability (aka hybrid) is a both universal goal and frighteningly complex.  Clearly, Terraform is a step in the right direction, but it’s only a step.  At HashiConf, I enjoyed watching companies trying take that next step with varying degrees of success.  Let’s get some popcorn and see how it turns out!

Until then, check out our Digital Rebar Terraform provider.  It will make your physical infrastructure “cloud equivalent” so you can run similar plans between cloud and metal.

For more information on the Digital Rebar Terraform provider, listen to this recent podcast.

September 22 – Weekly Recap of All Things Digital Rebar and RackN

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Welcome to the weekly post of the RackN blog recap of all things Digital Rebar, RackN, SRE, and DevOps. If you have any ideas for this recap or would like to include content please contact us at info@rackn.com or tweet Rob (@zehicle) or RackN (@rackngo)

Items of the Week

This week, RackN released a new high-level image highlighting the RackN and Digital Rebar solution and how they operate together to deliver provisioning services. Next week, we will provide further detail into how Digital Rebar operates between RackN Infrastructure Management and the provisioned hardware and VMs.

Digital Rebar Community

Terraform to Metal with Digital Rebar
Data Center Bacon Blog

We’ve built a buttery smooth Terraform provider for Bare Metal that runs equally on, of course, servers, Packet.net servers or VirtualBox VMs. If you like Hashicorp Terraform and want it to own your data center too, then read on.

Deep into the Digital Rebar Provision (DRP) release plan, a customer asked the RackN team to build a Terraform provider for DRP.  They had some very specific requirements that would stress all the new workflows and out-of-band management features in the release: in many ways, this integration is the ultimate proof point for DRP v3.1 because it drives DRP autonomously.

The primary goal was simple: run a data center as a resource pool for Terraform.

Digital Rebar and Terraform Provisioning Podcast

Digital Rebar v3.1 Product Launch
Product Launch Blog

We’ve made open network provisioning radically simpler.  So simple, you can install in 5 minutes and be provisioning in under 30.  That’s a bold claim, but it’s also an essential deliverable for us to bridge the Ops execution gap in a way that does not disrupt your existing tool chains.

The v3 mantra is about starting simple and allowing users to grow automation incrementally.  RackN has been building advanced automation packages and powerful UX management to support that mission.

Key v3.1 Features:

  • Layered Storage System
  • Content Packaging System
  • Plug-In System
  • Stages, Tasks & Jobs
  • Websocket API for Event Subscription
  • Embedded UI

Digital Rebar Provision 3.1 Launch Podcast

First Online Meetup: Sept 26, 2017 at 11:00am PST
Join Meetup Group Here : Meetup Announcement Blog

Topics for Meetup:

  • Welcome
  • Introduction to Digital Rebar Provision (DRP) and RackN
  • Naming the Digital Rebar mascot [1]
  • Discussion on DRP version 3.1 features
  • Feature and roadmap planning for DRP version 3.2
  • Use Github Projects or Trello Board
  • Demo of DRP workload deployment
  • Getting in touch with the Digital Rebar community and RackN
  • Questions and answers period

UPCOMING EVENTS

Rob Hirschfeld and Greg Althaus are preparing for a series of upcoming events where they are speaking or just attending. If you are interested in meeting with them at these events please email info@rackn.com

If you are attending any of these events please reach out to Rob Hirschfeld to setup time to learn more about our solutions or discuss the latest industry trends.

OTHER NEWSLETTERS

Digital Rebar v3.1 Release Annoucement

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We’ve made open network provisioning radically simpler.  So simple, you can install in 5 minutes and be provisioning in under 30.  That’s a bold claim, but it’s also an essential deliverable for us to bridge the Ops execution gap in a way that does not disrupt your existing tool chains.

We’ve got a remarkable list of feature additions between Digital Rebar Provision (DRP) v3.0 and v3.1 that take it from basic provision into a powerful distributed infrastructure automation tool.

But first, we need to put v3.1 into a broader perspective: the new features are built from hard learned DevOps lessons.  The v2 combination of integrated provisioning and orchestration meant we needed a lot of overhead like Docker, Compose, PostgreSQL, Consul and RAILS.  That was needed for complex “one-click” cluster builds; however it’s overkill for users of Ansible, Terraform and immutable infrastructure flows.  

The v3 mantra is about starting simple and allowing users to grow automation incrementally.  RackN has been building advanced automation packages and powerful UX management to support that mission.

So what’s in the release?  The v3.0 release focused on getting core Provision infrastructure APIs, process and patterns working as a stand alone service. The v3.1 release targeted major architectural needs to streamline content management, event notification and add out-of-band actions.  

Key v3.1 Features

  • New Mascot and Logo!  We have a cloud native bare metal bear.  DRP fans should ask about stickers and t-shirts. Name coming soon! 
  • Layered Storage System. DRP storage model allows for layered storage tiers to support the content model and a read only base layer. These features allow operators to distribute content in a number of different ways and make field upgrades and multi-site synchronization possible.
  • Content packaging system.  DRP contents API allows operators to manage packages of other models via a single API call.  Content bundles are read-only and versioned so that field upgrades and patches can be distributed.
  • Plug-in system.  DRP allows API extensions and event listeners that are in the same process space as the DRP server.  This enables IPMI extensions and slack notifiers.
  • Stages, Tasks & Jobs.  DRP has a simple work queue system in which tasks are stored and tracked on machines during stages in their boot sequences.  This feature combines server and DRP client actions to create fast, simple and flexible workflows that don’t require agents or SSH access.
  • Websocket API for event subscription.  DRP clients can subscribe to system events using a long term websocket interface.  Subscriptions include filters so that operators can select very narrow notification scopes.
  • Removal of the minimal embedded UI (moving to community hosted UX).   DRP decoupled the user interface from the service API.  This allows features to be added to the UX without having to replace the Service.  This also allows community members to create their own UX.  RackN has agreed to support community users at no cost on a limited version of our commercial UX.

All of these features enable DRP to perform 100% of the hardware provision workflows that our customers need to run a fully autonomous, CI/CD enabled data center.  RackN has been showing examples of Ansible, Kubernetes, and Terraform to Metal integration as a reference implementations.

Getting the physical layer right is critical to closing your infrastructure execution gaps.  DRP v3.1 goes beyond getting it right – it makes it fast, simple and open.  Take a test drive of the open source code or give RackN a call to see our advanced automation demos.